Watch Sioux Falls TEDx speakers share ‘ideas worth spreading’

A late-season snow didn’t stop a dedicated crowd from filling the Museum of Visual Materials last week as TEDx Sioux Falls returned for the first time in five years.

Nine speakers were chosen for the event from 90 applicants. Here’s a look at their talks.

Alan and John Berdahl: Achieving immortality

Man’s search for immortality is as old as man itself. We can’t cheat death completely, but we can cheat death a little by allowing a piece of ourselves to physically live on in others through organ donation. We discuss the medical, psychological and religious overtone associated with becoming a hero by becoming a donor.

Eleanor Turner: How (not) to name a baby

Have you ever heard the name of a new baby and thought — oh my? There’s a reason for that. Let’s explore why some baby names are a hit and others can literally send you to jail, using statistics and facts accumulated from a decade of research.

Todd Novak: My life among freshmen and the adults who teach them

How we interact around the conference tables of business and education is an expression of how we handle ideas. What if ideas were marbles? This talk uses this illustration to show how we need to create a great table as well as understanding the powerful tools of marble bags, solution marbles and the making of marbles to give away.

Sarah Rhea Werner: When you can’t help everyone

My dad is a pastor and raised me to be a “helper” — to serve and put others first, no matter what. But with 9-plus billion people on the planet, helping everyone — or even everyone you meet in life — isn’t exactly feasible. So how do we put limits on service without feeling inadequate? Whom do we decide to help with our limited energy and resources? And how do we find satisfaction despite never being “enough”?

All of the world’s institutions, businesses and organizations, no matter how big or how strong, are only as good, as righteous or as effective as their leadership. In a time when leadership is at its greatest need, it is also at its greatest shortage, but who is responsible for teaching leadership? Can we make leadership truly accessible? Not only can we make it accessible but also we can make it the type of intrinsic and dynamic leadership that the world requires today.

Rebecca Wiener McGregor: How not to splatter your spilled milk

As a leader and person of influence, you captivate, entertain and persuade with people everywhere and all the time. Make no mistake: your words stick. Your words are made up of your thoughts and beliefs about life and how you’ve experienced it. Therefore, it is your responsibility to your audience and to your message to deliver it from a healed and resolved place with authenticity. If you don’t, you run the risk of your limiting beliefs being splattered right into the ears and hearts of those who trust you. This is your call to heal your spilled milk.

Hugh Weber: Designing community

The era we’re living through contains a juxtaposition of two dissonant realities: technology has promised us a world more connected than ever before while culture reflects a more extreme sense of disconnection — in values, politics, community — than any of us have ever experienced. While we deal with the fact that on average we have fewer close friends, fewer meaningful contacts and fewer bowling leagues, perhaps the solution to our challenges lies with the bridge builders and problem solvers that the world calls designers.

Laura Renee Chandler: Black history matters in South Dakota

The presence of African Americans in South Dakota stretches back to the earliest days of the territory, yet this history is often a surprise to people in this region and beyond. Why is Black history not a larger part of the popular imaginings of South Dakota, and how do the silences around Black history reflect longstanding historical erasures of the contributions of people of color? We miss so much of our collective history when we fail to consider the varied and complicated histories of African Americans who lived and passed through here. This talk will encourage everyone to think critically about the intersections between local and regional histories and the larger national and global conversations on racism, colonization and segregation. The aim is that we use this information to create a more just and inclusive community.

Jeff Gould: How I learned to live by officiating 500 funerals

Fifteen years, hundreds of funerals, thousands of stories. And just a few short sentences that have changed my life forever.